Jonathan Kay: For the 23rd anniversary of the Ecole Polytechnique massacre, Amish lessons in mourning

Amish lessons in mourning for the Polytechnique massacre anniversary

Twenty-three years ago, on December 6, 1989, Marc Lépine walked into École Polytechnique and shot 28 people, killing 14 of them, and then himself.

To this day, his rampage is remembered principally as a gesture of misogynistic hatred — a symptom of a more general malign attitude that, in some form, supposedly poisons the minds of every man. Canadian ultra-feminist Judy Rebick, for instance, has seized on Lépine’s act as a symbol of a popular “backlash” aimed at rolling back “legal abortion, a rape shield law, pay equity, employment equity and constitutional equality.”

It’s true that all of the dead, and all but four of the wounded, were women. Lépine himself (born as Gamil Rodrigue Liass Gharbi) declared to his victims that he was “fighting feminism,” and prepared a manifesto outlining his misogynistic attitudes. But I think Barbara Frum had it right when a day later, she asked, on CBC’s The Journal: “Why do we diminish [the act] by suggesting that it was an act against just one group?”

Like other school shooters, Lépine presented his motives to the world in a way that he imagined gave them some sort of larger political coherence. But the more obvious explanation is that — like Aurora, Co. movie-theatre shooter James Holmes, and many other mass shooters — Lépine was simply insane. His age, 25, roughly corresponded to that at which schizophrenia and related mental-health conditions typically become acute.

Lépine’s whole adult life was one long history of neurosis, antisocial behaviour, and symptoms of mental disease — exacerbated by abuse and abandonment by his father. Read his eccentric murder manifesto, and his unhinged nature becomes clear: On his female-victim wish list were a half-dozen police officers whose crime was playing on a volleyball team together.

As with Holmes, the Dark Knight shooter, there likely was no larger social or political message at play — it was just a horrible tragedy that symbolizes nothing more than our inability to prevent bad things from happening to good people. That inability is frustrating and tragic. But it’s been part of the human condition forever, and will continue to be such forevermore. The same — not coincidentally — is true of religion, whose promise of a purer world beyond this vale of tears can supply us with strength and reassurance when the world around us goes blood red.

But this is not a religious age, and Canada is not a religious country: Government has replaced God as the answer to evil. Thus, the Canadian Firearms Registry, which the Chrétien Liberals introduced, in part, as a response to the Polytechnique massacre. There is no evidence that the registry has saved a single life. (And on a strictly actuarial basis, the hundreds of millions that were poured into it surely could have saved dozens of lives, at least, had they been plowed into, say, health care or road safety.) But the idea that government can protect us from the next tragedy, that we can control our fate and prevent evil simply by selecting the right policies, is psychologically precious to us.

Indeed, that faith has itself become a form of quasi-religion. In 2009, some left-wing MPs even refused to mourn alongside Conservatives at the 20th anniversary of the École Polytechnique massacre — on the grounds that the Tories had rejected the divinely revealed Truth of the gun registry. This petty gesture was essentially militant old-fashioned religious sectarianism in secular garb.

It’s interesting to see how truly religious people — the ones who still put their faith in God, rather than state — respond to such tragedies.

In 2006, a milkman named Charles C. Roberts IV walked into a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Bart Township, Pennsylvania, and did something very similar to what Lépine did in 1989: He lined up 10 girls — aged 6 to 13 — against the wall and opened fire, killing half of them and wounding the rest. Like Lépine, he killed himself before he could be apprehended.

The tight-knit Amish community responded quickly with collective action. They tore down the schoolhouse, and built a new one down the street. The parents and neighbours all grieved in the normal, agonized human way. But there was none of the political, tribal fury against men (or anyone else) that erupted after Polytechnique.

This is especially shocking because not only was Roberts a man targeting girls, he was also a non-Amish outsider who had slaughtered Amish children. Yet, according to a 2007 New York Timesreport, local Amish and non-Amish alike “have given the widow of the gunman, Charles C. Roberts IV, and the couple’s three children comfort and unconditional support. Neighbors put up a Christmas tree at the local volunteer fire hall and decorated it with toys and gift cards for the family. Soccer players at Solanco High School in nearby Quarryville made it a point to show their encouragement by attending soccer matches played by the Robertses’ young son Brice.”

“I pray for the families of the children,” a local artist told the Times reporter. “And I thought about what a struggle it was for them to live out each day in forgiveness.”

Living each day “in forgiveness” — think about that for a moment. Then compare those words to our reaction to Polytechnique, which has featured bitter attacks on men, Conservatives, and every Canadian who doesn’t happen to think that a national bureaucratic boondoggle is the best way to honour the legacy of 28 people gunned down by a mentally unstable lunatic.

Evil will always be with us. What changes are the psychological reflexes that help us deal with it. In that sense, we can learn a lot from the men and women who still ride around in horses and buggies.